on-demand software test management

In one of my previous positions (we’re talking in decades…) I had a manager who really liked reports. He was all over us with requests for reports, most of them statistics about performance vs. goals but there were others as well.

We had to create nice, fancy reports (charts and graphs), with many colors and lots of numbers on them to satisfy him and found ourselves not doing what we should have been doing – working.

Of course all of these reports were at best glanced at and then thrown to the place all papers end their life.

The fact was that there were always too many reports created, too many different views of the same data, by too many people. In reality only a few reports were used and benefited the company.
Since then many things have changed, but managers didn’t. They still want reports. Only now creating reports out of the data stored in the various applications we all have in our work environment is easy. In fact it’s usually so easy that even our managers can do it! A click of a mouse.

A good reporting system gives the option to create the reports needed, with current data and a nice simple presentation. I’m referring here to ‘reports’ mostly in their ‘chart’ form, and it is essential to remember that a chart is simply a representation of data in a visual way.

The main thing about reports is to be able to get those that have a contribution to the organization, by having the specific data, in that certain way and for that period of time. The report/chart should give such information that we’ll be able to use it to learn and improve (a process, an employee, a method, goals – something).

Its important not to create reports that no one can understand, and are overload with data and information which misses the best part of a good report (being visually simple and quick to understand).

As Groucho Marx once said: “Why a four-year-old child could understand this report. Run out and find me a four-year-old child. I can’t make head nor tail out of it”…

There’s no need, in my opinion, to have a “monster” reporting system. 97% of it will be never used. Let’s concentrate on the 3%, make it easy to use, nice to look at and flexible enough to keep all users happy.

What should a good report include and be:

• Easy & Quick to create
• Current updated data
• ‘Active’ (show figures on mouse move etc.)
• Type (i.e. line, bar, radar) relevant to the data
• Efficient display of the data
• Meaningful, descriptive title
• Axes labels
• Axes scaled proportionally
• Legend, if needed
• Gridline, where required

    We are now designing and building the first reports on Testuff. As always it is based on requests and recommendations we have gathered from many users for some time now, and hopefully by that will be what they really need and want.

Following our own way of doing things, we plan to ‘start at the start’ and grow from there.
We’ll keep you posted with the progress we make.

  

On August 6th we have reached our first 1,000 registered companies (and we posted it at Testuff is 1000 companies old!). A few weeks ago we had the bells ringing again, when our 2,000th company registered to the service. Simple math, which even we can do without mistakes, shows a nice average of 125 registrations a month in this period. In fact, the current average is actually higher and looks like the Internet famous growth potential for small businesses such as ourselves proves right, so far.

Now what?

This is all nice indeed and a good start, but surely not enough. Heard about Facebook ? Of course you have, and so have over 200,000,000 registered Facebook users (amazing number, isn’t it?). Bottom line? Facebook has yet to earn its first profit Dollar. And don’t get us wrong, we love what they are doing, respect their success and sure they’ll find the right model soon.

As a new and small business we are constantly in search of the best approach between two options – get as many registrations, become big(ger) and only then deal with generating income somehow OR grow slowly, adding only paying customers while trying to keep the expenses as low as we can, all that in the old fashioned way of actually making money from each of those customers.

It is a common understanding by now, that the “eye balls”, “registered users” and other such Internet terms are not enough any more for a business to thrive. There has to be logic, a business model, leading to a very simple result where the expenses are less than the income and the company earns money. Our goal is not “to grow” but rather “to grow smart”, meaning that growing by itself doesn’t say much about your business.

As Warren Buffet said about his basic business rules: “Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.”

It should work better for you as well – we guess you’d rather get your testing services from a profitable company and not a losing (and fading?) one.

So our challenge now is to continue building good products, giving excellent service and growing in number of customers while maintaining these business rules and helping ourselves to stick around for many more years. No less important is that we’ll continue to enjoy what we’re doing, which helps us work better and hopefully makes our users happier.
We’ll check this when we get to 3,000 and share the results with you

Note: Facebook had their first 100,000,000 registered users celebrated in a huge party. They decided not to celebrate the new milestone number, as they probably realized it is better to celebrate earnings growth…

  

“Built to Last“, the successful book by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, tells us about great organizations, real visionary companies that have prospered over long periods of time, and shows the unique practices and habits that these companies adopted. But I wonder if any of these companies’ CEO or founders could answer a simple question: “Can you promise that your company will survive?”

Particularly in this financial climate, we see more or more companies going bust, some of which are major brands. Only a few months ago they were all showing fantastic profits and no-one would ever imagine such a collapse. So how do you know who to put your faith in? What assurances can you expect to get from your business partners, suppliers and service providers?

Customers are asking us different questions, amongst which:
- How long has the company been in existence?
- How many employees do you have?
- How many clients do you have?
- What industry sectors do these clients operate in?

I guess that all these questions mean: “Are you a real company that is built to last?”, or – perhaps the real question is – are you just two students working in a warehouse with no penny, no future and no ability to survive more than a few months .

I believe that no company could promise such a thing, but what every CEO can promise is a commitment to manage the company in a responsible way and to take all the necessary steps to keep the company profitable and strong.

Sharing some business indicators that show that the company is ‘on the ball’ usually helps.

So what are our success indicators so far?:
- We have more then 1700 registered companies, with clear increase in new companies per day ratio.
- We see a steady growth in revenue over the very few months of commercial operation.
- We are earning more, and not losing money – our income is higher than our operational expenses.
- We have started expanding our business using selected affiliates.
- Our dev team releases a new major version every 4-6 weeks as planned.
- We keep meeting customer expectations and deliver feature requests consistently.
- Our support team responds to most queries within a few hours.
- We keep going.
- We keep going.
- We keep going

Sure. We can use some fancy slogans, promise that we will always be #1 and publish a press release for every new customer. But this is not our way here at Testuff.

  

This post is a personal post. so if you don’t like it, just scroll your mouse wheel to the next post in your RSS reader.

Ido is leaving Testuff and I would like to thank him for all the wonderful
work he did. He joined us when our product was in beta and is leaving when it’s very stable and in production and he had quite a bit to do with that.

During development, there is always the dilemma of whether to let developers test the product or to hire testers to do the job. I always believed that it was better to hire a tester, but if you needed some more testers, you could use developers to temporarily extent the testing team. I thought that testing was an easier job then was programming, and it made sense to me that if the developer has some free time on his hands, the company can use him as a tester as well.

After a few months with Ido I realized that I was way off. Asking a developer do a tester’s job is like asking a hen to fly – he can do it, but usually rather badly. Developers have a particular state of mind that helps them write new code, solve problems in old code and improvise solutions when the direct approach doesn’t seem to work. They subconsciously trod lightly when using the software and cautiously walk around problematic areas and places they know might now work correctly. A tester’s state of mind is altogether different – he’s always looking for new and exciting ways to bring the program to its knees and is constantly on the lookout for the smallest inconsistencies, controls that are off by even one pixel and ways the application can be improved. I’ve never thought of it this way until I had a chance to work alongside a world-class tester.

“Eating our own dog food” usually means using the tool that sell. In Testuff, Ido was eating most of the dog food while the rest of us were, well, making it. Ido was the first to use Testuff in our own testing process, and forced us to improve it to fit to his insanely high standards of user
interface and usability. He brought the same high standards to our customer support, web site and blog, which I think, is self evident.

Ido needs these days some time off after the busy months he had, planing to think and decide about his future plan calmly.

I wish him the best of luck.

Arik

  

Me and the rest of the Testuff team wishes you a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and also Happy Hanukkah! Everyone says the coming year won’t be easy, but may it be a wonderful opportunity for change and to appreciate the finer things in life.

  

Continuing the SaaS series after a short break, we’ve seen that folks are afraid of SaaS security. However, there are further concerns people have with SaaS. One of them is SaaS reliability. The concern may be expressed as follows:

I’m worried about reliability. There might be outages and congestion accessing hosted services on the Internet.

There are outages and congestion issues on the internal network as well. I remember servers going up and down, slow connectivity, and even worms shutting down communication in the whole internal network at one of my previous employers. There’s plenty of maintenance work that gets done in internal networks and the network admins don’t think too much before flipping the switch.

Even if you don’t use any SaaS per se and your internal network is operating at top speed, people can’t work without access to the Internet. Even if just Google.com goes down people stare dumbly at the screen or head to a coffee break. Everyone highly depends on the Internet in the software industry and if there are access problems to the Internet there’s more than just SaaS and Testuff at stake, but also search engines, webmail, knowledge sources like Wikipedia, blogs, and whatnot. In a certain sense of the word, we’re all using SaaS already, we just aren’t aware of it.

Truth of the matter is that SaaS is more reliable than local servers. Just look at uptime logs for site hosting on the net, you will find they are usually above 99%. Even when we had to take Testuff down for a DRP drill, we thought ten times before doing so, notified our customers plenty of time beforehand, and made sure it was for the shortest time possible.

Speaking of which, SaaS companies confirm to the highest reliability standards. Testuff has a DRP and we perform drills to make sure we’re on top of our game. All the Testuff data is backed up regularly and replicated for maximum resilience. We keep constant monitoring on our servers to make sure everything is working at all times.

Do you get this kind of service for your local servers? If so, how much is it costing you? Are you concerned with SaaS reliability? Is your internal network truly reliable? Drop a comment and tell us about it.

We’ll take a short break from the SaaS series to talk about something else that I and my colleagues really care about at Testuff – Usability.

Many of our users notice how simple Testuff is to use, that you really don’t need to read the Testuff help section to wrap your brain around it. We love it and are always on the look out how to make things even simpler especially if we get to try out cool new and intuitive design patterns.

Sometimes however usability goes wrong. Take a look at this screenshot and immediately answer the following questions: Which links have already been visited?

The immediate answer will probably be the gray links, right? Wrong! It’s the black ones I’ve already visited.

Why did you think this way? Probably because you associated the gray color with disabled controls in software, generally with old stuff, with the past. The black, in this context at least, looks like the shiny new fresh from the print links.

This is actually quite an embarassement for a website about design, but that’s life, and even Testuff has bugs I understand that they wanted colors to fit the website color scheme, and even though black is generally a bad color for links a reversal of the link visited/unvisited colors could do the site well. The interviews on that page are fascinating though!

  

Last week I started a series of posts to examine why people are afraid of SaaS. So, let’s dive in and examine one of the fears that I have seen come up all too often – fear of SaaS security. Someone who’s afraid that SaaS isn’t secure may make the following claim:

I don’t use SaaS because I’m afraid of security. Keeping the data on our internal network is safer.

Well my friend, the internal network is not as safe as you think it is. It’s not completely cut off from the Internet like networks in the good old days. There’s always an access point to the net and open ports in the firewall that allow viruses, worms, and hackers to get through and exploit security holes. With security holes being exploited, your data could leak out or get destroyed altogether.

Also, as the cliche says, most break-ins happen from inside the company. Organizations keep a very strict security policy for incoming connections. What about outgoing connections? Or connections that don’t even reach the external firewall? What measures are put in the internal network to make sure it’s secure? In most cases the answer will probably be “not much” until some disgruntled employee who has been cut loose decides to wreck havoc.

Even if you do have internal servers, it’s likely that not all company data is stored in the internal network anyhow. Do you use Gmail/Yahoo Mail/Hotmail/Messenger to communicate with co-workers, clients, send company files, and whatnot? Maybe even Google Docs to work on your documents from anywhere? If so, even though you may not like to admit it, you’re already using SaaS. Some of the company data is lying outside of your internal network, and according to the above line of thought it’s “unsafe”.

What about SaaS? How can hosting services somewhere out there in the web be secure? We’ve seen why the internal network isn’t that great, but that doesn’t make SaaS any safer. So, let’s explore some key points in favor of SaaS when it comes to security.

Since SaaS is accessible from anywhere, SaaS vendors offer stronger security than internal servers. Let’s see how Testuff measures as a SaaS vendor. From the administrative side, the Testuff servers are protected behind firewalls with the utmost strict of policies. We got security people monitoring the servers 24/7 to make sure everything is Kosher. Security patches are updated to our servers at a very high frequency as well. Of course our clients’ data belongs to them and we’re willing to sign an NDA if it’s necessary.

From the technological side, Testuff DBs can only be accessed via user and password. Passwords aren’t even saved on the servers, just their hashes are. All communication to the Testuff servers is encrypted via SSL. Testuff databases are also encrypted, so even if someone were to steal one somehow the sun would burn out before they would be able to decrypt it. Customer DBs are all separated logically, so one customer just can’t access data that belongs to another customer. Are your internal servers as secure as this?

Ironically, using hosted services for company data makes it harder for inside workers to hack. They obviously don’t have any privileges, control, or inside info to go and abuse the system like they would abuse internal servers. With security policies wound much tighter, a pissed off worker would have a much more difficult time to hack a hosted service than a server on the internal network.

Last but not least, as I already mentioned, you’re probably already using SaaS and everything is OK. Not only is it OK, but it’s making your work day more productive and comfortable. You get great tools and can easily collaborate with people around the globe or even in the next room with a service like Google Documents. So if you already use some SaaS, isn’t it possible that SaaS in additional fields may turn out to kick ass? Say a test management SaaS?

To sum it all up, it’s a myth that SaaS isn’t secure. In fact, SaaS can be more secure than locally hosted servesr. Of course, before you sign up with a SaaS vendor make sure their security policies fit the bill.

Security is important, but it’s not everything, so we’ll continue exploring people’s fears of SaaS next time. Until then, what are your security concerns when it comes to SaaS? Do you feel that SaaS vendors are fulfilling them, or are they lacking in some way? Drop a comment and let me know!

  

When Testuff was established the founders discussed what would be the right model for it. SaaS (Software as a Service) was the lucky winner. The decision was made since we figure that small companies don’t like and can’t afford to keep lot’s of servers around. They take up maintenance time, machines and  IT guys cost money, and all in all cause an obstruction from the main gig, from testing.

Also, we had the exemplary success of Salesforce.com, a hosted CRM service. We figured if people are willing to host data about their customers online, one of the most valuable assets of a company, they shouldn’t have much trouble hosting their test data online.

Right? Wrong. From time to time I get an email from one of our customers that reads more or less as follows:

I really like Testuff. Do you have a local installation of the Testuff server? We don’t want to keep our testing data outside the internal network and depend on a hosted service.

Looks like people are reluctant to keep their testing data online. It seems to stem from several fears about SaaS, fears that you may have as well. I’d like to address these fears directly in a short series of posts and see if they make sense. That is, if you’re worse off having your test data hosted than hosting it yourself in the internal network.

In the meantime, let me know what you think about SaaS! Do you use any hosted services other than Testuff? If so, which ones? What do you like about them? If you don’t use any SaaS, what are your concerns?

  

Google is a big let down sometimes. While creating a presentation in PowerPoint 2003, I tried to figure out how to change the background image. The crummy PowerPoint GUI wasn’t of much help, so I turned to Google. Yet, the first search results didn’t really seem to help.

So, without further a due, here are simple steps how to change the background image in PowerPoint, hoping this post will get its proper placing in Google so that people will get the help they need:

1. In the main slide editing screen, right click a blank space in one of the slides.
2. In the right click menu, choose Background…
3. Click the empty dropdown menu, it’s right below the small colorful picture.
4. Choose Fill Effects.
5. Click the Picture tab.
6. Click Select Picture…
7. Choose the relevant picture and click OK.
8. Click OK in the the Fill Effects window.
9. Back in the Background window, click Apply to All to set the background for all slides.

Ta da! The background image is now set for your presentation and new slides will include it automatically. It’s crazy how the usability for this sucks, I hope that Microsoft improved it for the latest versions of office, I have yet to use them.